The NLM began in 1836 with "a small collection of medical books on a single shelf in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army," writes the library's current director, Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD, in the new book Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine.

After the Civil War, then director John Shaw Billings set out to collect "all of the world's medical knowledge in one place." Over the years, the library's name changed from the Army Medical Library, to the Armed Forces Medical Library, to its present-day name, and its collection has grown to some 17 million items, including films (see below), propaganda posters and advertisements.

Although the library was conceived as a place for doctors to find information on treating patients and curing disease, the collection now serves a record of the history of medicine. It's a "history of cities, race, factory production, sexuality, print technology, photography, feminism, motion pictures, the railroad, colonization, war, aesthetics...," according to the book's introduction.

The book highlights a handful of the eclectic items in the collection, from 16th-century anatomical texts by Andreas Vesalius, to 20th-century Army training films warning soldiers about venereal disease, to photographs documenting what nurses were wearing in Hong Kong, circa 1950. (See above, second row, left.)